AN ISLAND IN THE SEA OF HISTORY 



1121 



rises the slender stone minaret of the 

 ^lohammedan mosque, and on some high 

 point of vantage stands a square loop- 

 holed war-tower, in which the surviving 

 inhabitants take refuge and defend them- 

 selves to the last when their village has 

 been taken by assault. Some of these 

 ooiils are so much like New Mexican 

 pueblos, both in location and in archi- 

 tecture, that they would seem to have 

 . been built by closely related peoples ; but 

 the resemblances, of course, are due to 

 similarity of environment and conditions, 

 not to a common ethnological inheritance. 

 The mind of man thinks and reasons in 

 the eastern Caucasus just as it does in 

 Arizona and New Mexico, and when the 

 environment and the conditions are the 

 same, the results are almost identical. 



the: wonderful racial type:s of the 

 caucasus 



Although the aoids of Daghestan 

 closely resemble one another in situation 

 and type, the people who live in them 

 differ widely in features, coloring, lan- 

 guage, and origin. Some of them have 

 the blue eyes, blond beards, and fair skin 

 of the Germans described by Tacitus, 

 while others are unmistakably Jews, Ta- 

 tars, Persians, Armenians, or colonists 

 from the Mediterranean. 



I do not mean that they have had any 

 recent connection with the people now 

 called by those names. Their ancestors 

 separated from the ancestors of the latter 

 perhaps thousands of years ago. Many 

 of the Tatars are descendants of the wild 

 nomads who rode westward from cen- 

 tral Asia under Genghis Khan and Tam- 

 erlane ; the Jews were certainly settled in 

 the eastern Caucasus long before the 

 birth of Christ; the Teutons were prob- 

 ably there before any of the Aryan tribes 

 moved into the territory that is now Ger- 

 many, and the Mediterranean colonists 

 sailed from Italy and Greece perhaps as 

 early as the time of ^schylus and Pin- 

 dar. 



But the Jews, Teutons, Celts, Persians, 

 Arabs, and Monglos who now live in the 

 eastern Caucasus are not brothers of the 

 peoples called by the same names in Asia 

 and western Europe; they are cousins a 

 hundred times removed. Long isolation 



and a mountainous environment, more- 

 over, have so modified them psychologi- 

 cally that they no longer resemble the 

 peoples to whom they are ethnologically 

 related (see page 1127). 



In character and temperament they are 

 much more like one another than they 

 are like the races and nationalities whose 

 physical types they still retain. Their 

 features and coloring are those of their 

 remote ancestors ; but their minds all 

 bear the impress of the mountainous en- 

 vironment in which, for hundreds of gen- 

 erations their forefathers lived. 



Their languages, even, have changed to 

 such an extent that they are hardly recog- 

 nizable as variations of Aryan, Semitic, 

 or Mongolian speech. Seventeen differ- 

 ent languages are spoken by the high- 

 landers of Daghestan, but only a few of 

 them can be referred with certainty to 

 any known linguistic stock. In some 

 parts of the province I heard the sharp, 

 peculiar clicks which are characteristic of 

 certain south African tongues, but which 

 do not occur as consonantal sounds in 

 any of the written languages of Europe 

 or Asia. 



MOHAMMEDANS WHO COULD BE MISTAKEN 

 FOR SCOTTISH ELDERS OF THE KIRK 



The predominant ethnological types 

 in the parts of Daghestan that I visited 

 were Teutonic or Celtic. Some of the 

 men whom I saw would have been taken 

 for Germans in any capital of western 

 Europe, while others were so unmistak- 

 ably Scottish that they might have been 

 McKenzies, McDonalds, or McLeans 

 from Argyle or Inverness. A Daghestan 

 highlander of the Scots type is shown 

 on page 1125. If this man, in Canadian 

 dress, should walk into a Presbyterian 

 kirk in Nova Scotia on a Sunday morn- 

 ing, every member of the congregation 

 would take him for Scotsman, and would 

 expect him to understand the Gaelic ser- 

 mon and join in the singing of the Gaelic 

 psalms. And yet he and his ancestors 

 have probably lived in the Caucasus for 

 a thousand years. 



Intellectually, these highlanders of the 

 Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic type 

 are more nearly akin to us Americans 

 than are any of their hundred-times-re- 



